Yamila al Shanti has become the first woman to be elected to the executive directorate of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) after an internal process that lasted three weeks.
The Executive Directorate is the highest decision-making body of the Palestinian Islamist organization and will now have a wife for the first time. Al Shanti holds a BA in English from Ain Shams University in Egypt and a Masters and Ph.D. in Education from the Islamic University of Gaza.
She has been on the Israeli target list since 2006, when she led a women’s march that succeeded in breaking the Israeli military siege of the Umm al Nasr Mosque in Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, where Palestinian activists took refuge.
“From the beginning I worked as a leader in the Hamas movement and then I became part of the Islamic National Rescue Party, founded (by Hamas) after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority,” Al Shanti himself said in statements to the Palestinian. Press.
“In the 2006 parliamentary election,” in which Hamas prevailed, “I was on the list of change and reform (similar to Hamas) and have been teaching at the Department of Women’s Affairs ever since,” he explains.
Hamas’s own women’s movement has emphasized that Al Shanti’s nomination “crowns the movement’s civilized thinking.”